With turbulence in the Middle East and controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s response to the fatal attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Mitt Romney will outline Monday his foreign policy approach toward the Middle East in what his campaign is billing as a major address at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

The Romney campaign is stressing that the choice between President Obama and a Romney administration on foreign policy is stark. Romney will present a “bold choice between what we’ve seen these past four years and what he would bring in the next four years,” Alex Wong, foreign and legal policy director for the Romney campaign, told reporters on a conference call Sunday previewing the VMI speech.

The Romney campaign cast Obama as an outlier president who failed to continue a bipartisan tradition of a strong military and leadership in the world. Several times on the call, his advisers described Romney as following a tradition that included Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton while President Obama’s approach, they said, was similar to Jimmy Carter’s. Romney’s approach is “a restoration of a strategy that served us well for over 70 years” and will renew a “bipartisan vision” of foreign policy, Wong said. “[Obama’s] foreign policy is marked by passivity, by delay and by indecision.”

According to excerpts of Romney’s speech released in advance, Romney will propose a new approach to both the crisis Syria and the post-Mubarak regime in Egypt, but will offer few other specifics that directly depart from the Obama administration’s policies for the region.